When the dust settled in the lab after two long months of testing Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware’s ESX in the areas of performance, compatibility, management and security, it all boiled down to two issues: experience and religion.

VMware ESX took home our Clear Choice award because in our performance and qualitative analysis of the hypervisor and the first tier of management tools offered by each vendors it showed depth and maturity while Microsoft’s Hyper-V’s components were both very Windows-focused and very rough.

Performance, as reported earlier this month, heavily favored VMware, although Hyper-V edged out ESX in a few contests.

On the compatibility front, Microsoft’s Hyper-V’s early lead in the number of supported hardware platforms (based on the widespread of support for Windows 2008 Server itself) is completely offset by a dearth of support for non-Windows virtual machine (VM) operating systems. While VMware’s supported hardware list is shorter, its support of a comparatively vast number of operating systems made us cheer (see compatibility story).

Click to see: Score card

VMware’s Virtual Center management platform is also mature and straightforward in how an administrator can use it to control resident VMs on a VMware host. VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure Client (VIC) is the administrative user interface to the VMware Virtual Center platform.

Microsoft’s System Center-Virtual Machine Manager (SC-VMM) 2008 (we tested a very late beta version which Microsoft guaranteed was feature complete) works with very strong ties to the underlying Active Directory and has an interface that fits right into Microsoft’s System Center scheme, so administrators won’t have to work hard to understand how it works. That said, things from standard management tasks such as viewing simple settings for a VM host to much touted advances features like the ability to migrate ESX VMs to Hyper-V caused SC-VMM to crash repeatedly during testing.

Click to see: Microsoft, with its System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 software, provides a centralized console for viewing performance parameters of all Hyper-V host servers on the network.

In terms of the security options for these hypervisor environments, we found that both vendors need to beef up their authentication protection schemes and provide a designated, secure store for VM images.